Resident Evil 1 Remake Reportedly in Pre-Production

If the rumors hold up, you're looking at a third trip back to where the Resident Evil franchise started. Word is going around that a Resident Evil 1 remake is now in the pipeline at Capcom, and while that might sound like old news to longtime fans, this would actually be the first time the original game gets the full ground-up remake treatment the way Resident Evil 2, 3, and 4 already have.

The source here is Dusk Golem, a leaker who's been reliable on Resident Evil news in the past. Someone asked him directly whether a remake of the first game was coming, and he confirmed it, saying pre-production quietly kicked off around last August or September.

According to him, the project won't move into full production until Resident Evil Code: Veronica finishes up the crunch period it's currently going through.

That mention of crunch sparked a bit of a side conversation on its own, but it's worth remembering that crunch tends to happen near the end of almost any game's development cycle, even when things are going smoothly. So you shouldn't read too much into it as a sign that Veronica is in trouble.

What makes this one stand out is the order in which things are lining up. You already knew Resident Evil Code: Veronica was being remade, and you already knew Zero was getting the same treatment, so this Resident Evil 1 remake isn't next in line and isn't even the one right after that. It's the third game in that upcoming stretch, landing after both of those projects are finished.

Resident Evil 1 has technically already been revisited more than once. There was the GameCube version years back, which was built from the ground up rather than just being a visual upgrade, and then later an HD remaster came out on top of that.

So a full Resident Evil 1 remake now would mark the third significant reworking of this particular story, and that history is exactly why some fans are going to raise an eyebrow at Capcom going back to the well again instead of tackling a numbered entry that's never been touched.

For what it's worth, the original Resident Evil 1 isn't the game that hooked most millennial or Gen Z fans into the series.

A lot of people came in through Resident Evil 5, which leaned more into action, and there's a personal case to be made that Resident Evil 5 still holds up as one of the strongest entries in the whole lineup, flaws and all. Going back and playing the very first game after starting with something like that can feel like a jarring shift, with slow, awkward controls and a totally different pace.

Still, most modern breakdowns of the original game argue it holds up reasonably well today, even if it shows its age here and there. So a Resident Evil 1 remake landing before something like Resident Evil 5 or 6 gets touched is a little bit of a letdown for fans who'd rather see Capcom finish out the numbered mainline entries first.

That doesn't mean this is a bad move on Capcom's part, necessarily, just that priorities differ depending on which game brought you into the series in the first place. The hope is that Capcom eventually works through the rest of the mainline games rather than circling back for a fourth or fifth pass at the earlier ones, especially since repeats like a second Resident Evil 2 remake before reaching Five would probably frustrate people even more.

There's actually a reason Capcom skipped the first game originally and jumped straight to Resident Evil 2 when the remake era began. Revisiting the original that many times so soon probably felt redundant at the time. Now, with enough distance and enough successful remakes under Capcom's belt, that concern seems to have faded, which is likely part of why a Resident Evil 1 remake is even on the table again.

As for when you might actually get your hands on it, don't expect this anytime soon.

With two other remakes still ahead of it in the queue, and possibly even a new mainline entry squeezed in before that, a realistic release window is probably 2029 at the earliest, maybe stretching into 2030. It is a smaller-scale game compared to some of the others, so development might not take as long once it ramps up, but there's still a long road between now and launch.

For now, this is still just a fresh rumor, nothing officially confirmed by Capcom, and is worth taking with a reasonable amount of caution. But if Dusk Golem's track record holds, you can likely expect more details on this Resident Evil 1 remake to trickle out over the next year or so as Veronica finishes up and the project moves into fuller production.